5 ms·

I don't think it's anything so serious as God's way of showing us anything. IQ tests don't measure intelligence perfectly, especially at the higher ranges. If

by pg 18y ago

I don't think it's anything so serious as God's way of showing us anything. IQ tests don't measure intelligence perfectly, especially at the higher ranges. If millions of people take IQ tests, there will be a few who are super-good at whatever they do measure. Occam's razor says she is one of them. I remember taking an official IQ test in 5th or 6th grade. One of the questions was how many feet there were in a mile. I kid you not. It happened that I was a runner, so I knew a lap around the track was 440 yards. 440 x 4 = 1760, 1760 x 3 = 5280. But even at the time I remember thinking, how could intelligence possibly depend on that kind of random domain knowledge?

rms 18y ago
>I remember taking an official IQ test in 5th or 6th grade. There is still inherent cultural bias in IQ tests, but it's definitely not that bad anymore. There's also a big difference between group IQ tests, which some states administer alongside achievement tests in elementary school and are basically completely worthless for measuring anything at all, and actual IQ tests, done one on one with a psychologist. Normal IQ tests don't measure very high, to be certified with a 200+ IQ you need to take a test that looks more like a Putnam Competition test than anything else.
- pg 18y ago
  The test I took was the type done one on one with a psychologist.
  - rms 18y ago
    Yes, because the group IQ tests are lumped in with achievement tests kids often have no idea that it is different from the other achievement tests, whereas the psychologist tests certainly stand out. Looks like NYC public schools recently adopted a group IQ test after years of using the real thing... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otis-Lennon_School_Ability_Test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otis-Lennon_School_Ability_Test Also see this comment from Ronald Hoeflin (an author of multiple super IQ tests) about verbal intelligence. http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/ultra.html http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/ultra.html >A comment on verbal intelligence: Some people wonder about the value of verbal items as a measure of "intelligence," since trying such items seems to involve little or no intellectual effort. From the purely statistical standpoint, many studies repeatedly showed that verbal intelligence, including the sheer size of one's vocabulary, has one of the highest correlations of any type of test item with overall intelligence as measured by tests containing a wide variety of test items. See for example the book Intelligence in the United States, published around 1958, for ample documentation. On the purely intuitive level, one might say that learning a language, including vocabulary, is for the child like decoding hieroglyphics. The brighter child will master this decoding process far more readily than the average child. Later, of course, one can artificially boost the size of one's vocabulary, but cleverly designed tests of verbal intelligence can get around this problem by relying on somewhat atypical verbal items that one would be unlikely to pick up through a "vocabulary improvement" course but that a gifted child would be likely to have picked up if he has been reasonably inquisitive -- and isn't inquisitiveness an important part of intelligence? Finally, to use a computer analogy, a powerful computer without adequate software (analogous to verbal intelligence in humans) would be relatively unproductive no matter how powerful the hardware. -- RKH He has one more test that is publicly posted. http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/titan.html http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/titan.html
    - tokenadult 18y ago
      NONE of the "uncommonly difficult IQ tests" mentioned on that very interesting site have ever been properly validated.
      - trapper 18y ago
        Out of interests sake: how does one validate an IQ test?
        tokenadult 18y ago
        Out of interests sake: how does one validate an IQ test? Thanks for asking the important follow-up question that is so rarely asked. To validate an IQ test (a test that purports to estimate "general intelligence"), one must first reach a consensus among test designers about some sign of intelligence that is detectable outside the testing room. Over the years, psychologists have proposed various behavioral characteristics of human beings as signs that those human beings are "intelligent," with entering challenging, high-income occupations that require a lot of higher schooling being one criterion proposed for adult IQ tests, and being precocious in school and having good grades and good teacher ratings being one criterion that is proposed for child IQ tests. One finds a sample of persons to take a new brand of test in its norming administration, and rates those persons by external criteria of "intelligence," weighting those criteria by consensus, and then checks the rank-order correlation between the ranking of the test-takers yielded by the IQ test and the ranking of the test-takers yielded by the validation criteria. There will NEVER be a perfect ("1.0") correlation between the test and the validation criterion, just as there is never a perfect correlation between IQ scores on one occasion and IQ scores on another occasion on the same brand of IQ test by the same group of test-takers. There is enough play in the joints in both IQ test scoring (whatever the brand of test) and ranking people by other validation criteria (whatever they are), that strictly speaking one can't say that there is any all-time, universally significant ranking of human beings by intelligence. But a close-enough-for-government-work validation study would show an IQ test having correlations above .80, and perhaps even above .90, in comparison with previous brands of IQ tests, or in comparison with subsets of its own item content, or in comparison with some well regarded external validation criterion. For reasons mentioned in another comment in this thread (above?), there is especially little reliability, and hence especially little validity, for IQ scores far above the population mean, and thus it's very hard to devise a validation criterion that would sort, say, members of Mensa http://www.mensa.org/ http://www.mensa.org/ or members of the Study of Exceptional Talent http://cty.jhu.edu/set/index.html http://cty.jhu.edu/set/index.html or members of the Davidson Young Scholars program http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/ http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/ into their "true" rank order by IQ, not to mention that IQ scores for the same individual can and do change over the course of life.
- jhancock 18y ago
  The only thing I remember about being hauled out of class at about the same age, was sitting in a room with some guy I'd never met and taking some test thinking "this is complete BS...I don't want to be here".
Dilpil 18y ago
The concept of intelligence quotient is subjects score divided by average score of people subjects age. This is a pretty ridiculous metric, and anyone can see that the younger you are the better chance you have of scoring a genius IQ.
- tokenadult 18y ago
  Current IQ test scoring is always done on the basis of standard deviation scores for the comparison population. That is because, as you correctly point out, child IQ scores lead to nonsense results if they are taken to be ratios of one "mental age" to another "mental age."
tokenadult 18y ago
IQ tests don't measure intelligence perfectly, especially at the higher ranges. I would not use the word "measure" at all, but rather the word "estimate," for theoretical reasons mentioned by psychologist Joel Michell. It is well known that reliability of IQ tests is at its worst at the highest level of IQ scores. The author of the test that Marilyn vos Savant took was among the first to say so: "The reader should not lose sight of the fact that a test with even a high reliability yields scores which have an appreciable probable error. The probable error in terms of mental age is of course larger with older than with young children because of the increasing spread of mental age as we go from younger to older groups. For this reason it has been customary to express the P.E. [probable error] of a Binet score in terms of I.Q., since the spread of Binet I.Q.'s is fairly constant from age to age. However, when our correlation arrays [between Form L and Form M] were plotted for separate age groups they were all discovered to be distinctly fan-shaped. Figure 3 [not shown here on HN, alas] is typical of the arrays at every age level. "From Figure 3 it becomes clear that the probable error of an I.Q. score is not a constant amount, but a variable which increases as I.Q. increases. It has frequently been noted in the literature that gifted subjects show greater I.Q. fluctuation than do clinical cases with low I.Q.'s . . . . we now see that this trend is inherent in the I.Q. technique itself, and might have been predicted on logical grounds." (Terman & Merrill, 1937, p. 44)
- Alex3917 18y ago
  IMHO, the word measure seems more appropriate. Your IQ is just a number that measures how many questions you got right on an IQ test with the number of questions the median person got right. It's an exact number, not an estimate. As for what this means, it's neither a measure or an estimate. It just is. It might correlate with some stuff, but it doesn't seem appropriate to use either 'measure' or 'estimate' to describe any such relationships.
  - tokenadult 18y ago
    Your IQ is just a number that measures how many questions you got right on an IQ test with the number of questions the median person got right. It's an exact number, not an estimate. No, the IQ test result purports to say something about the test-taker's "intelligence," that is about how the test-taker would perform doing other tasks on a different occasion. And that is why every IQ test result is best described as an estimate. The longer answer about why most mental test results are best not described as measurements has to do with the technical meaning of "measurement" as it has developed in sciences preceding psychology, and that answer is given very nuanced discussion in Joel Michell's book Measurement in Psychology http://books.google.com/books?id=QXAAhBN8ZScC&dq=Joel+Michell&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=4Km0k2dyIU&sig=iYJkACquLj4Zo5WZSxXtB1Jq6Tg&hl=en&ei=oJDiSffRB5qYtAPlkem4CQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6 http://books.google.com/books?id=QXAAhBN8ZScC&dq=Joel+Mi... P.S. IQ test scores typically do NOT describe in any straightforward way what the item-content score of the test-taker was, and it's possible, on the same form of the same brand of IQ test, to obtain identical IQ scores with other test-takers without having identical item-content performance.
ivankirigin 18y ago
Any talk of IQ should include "the point", i.e. why you're paying attention. If measuring IQ corresponds with a wide reaching genetic study to find precursors for intelligence - awesome. If we're looking for reason to label a racial subset "lesser", than it's a waste. I remember a really awkward moment in 6th grade, where my teacher took me aside and told me that my tested IQ was top of the class, higher than hers, and only equal to her son's (also in the class). What in god's name could I say to that?
- nostrademons 18y ago
  "Umm, okay"? I think my response when I found out what my IQ was was, "That's nice."
- jhancock 18y ago
  As a child, I was never told what I tested at. What I was told is that they aren't supposed to tell you. Of course, once they start moving you into different groups of students you know you test out in the upper "bucket", but still, your not supposed to know your IQ score. Is my experience the norm here? Or did others here get told their score as a child?
  - sho 18y ago
    I wasn't told mine directly, but I found it out later by reading the assessment letter (I was forced to take a test to see if there was a learning-disability explanation to my poor grades).
  - dhimes 18y ago
    I had the same experience you describe.
  - Retric 18y ago
    The same thing happened to me. I was classified "Exceptionally Gifted / Learning Disabled" which seems like a contradiction in terms but seems fairly accurate. The school would bend over backwards for me because of the LD issue, but I saw little difference from the EG part of things. Mainly it seemed like they had no idea what to do with me. For example: I was in a remedial English class in 8th grade and then bumped the next year into the Honors English class which I passed by the skin of my teeth. PS: While I spent a few hours taking a lot of 1 on 1 tests I don't know if they did a real IQ test and I got over 160 or if it was a "soft test" and they used the same term.

by pg 18y ago

rms 18y ago

>I remember taking an official IQ test in 5th or 6th grade. There is still inherent cultural bias in IQ tests, but it's definitely not that bad anymore. There's also a big difference between group IQ tests, which some states administer alongside achievement tests in elementary school and are basically completely worthless for measuring anything at all, and actual IQ tests, done one on one with a psychologist. Normal IQ tests don't measure very high, to be certified with a 200+ IQ you need to take a test that looks more like a Putnam Competition test than anything else.

pg 18y ago
The test I took was the type done one on one with a psychologist.
- rms 18y ago
  Yes, because the group IQ tests are lumped in with achievement tests kids often have no idea that it is different from the other achievement tests, whereas the psychologist tests certainly stand out. Looks like NYC public schools recently adopted a group IQ test after years of using the real thing... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otis-Lennon_School_Ability_Test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otis-Lennon_School_Ability_Test Also see this comment from Ronald Hoeflin (an author of multiple super IQ tests) about verbal intelligence. http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/ultra.html http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/ultra.html >A comment on verbal intelligence: Some people wonder about the value of verbal items as a measure of "intelligence," since trying such items seems to involve little or no intellectual effort. From the purely statistical standpoint, many studies repeatedly showed that verbal intelligence, including the sheer size of one's vocabulary, has one of the highest correlations of any type of test item with overall intelligence as measured by tests containing a wide variety of test items. See for example the book Intelligence in the United States, published around 1958, for ample documentation. On the purely intuitive level, one might say that learning a language, including vocabulary, is for the child like decoding hieroglyphics. The brighter child will master this decoding process far more readily than the average child. Later, of course, one can artificially boost the size of one's vocabulary, but cleverly designed tests of verbal intelligence can get around this problem by relying on somewhat atypical verbal items that one would be unlikely to pick up through a "vocabulary improvement" course but that a gifted child would be likely to have picked up if he has been reasonably inquisitive -- and isn't inquisitiveness an important part of intelligence? Finally, to use a computer analogy, a powerful computer without adequate software (analogous to verbal intelligence in humans) would be relatively unproductive no matter how powerful the hardware. -- RKH He has one more test that is publicly posted. http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/titan.html http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/titan.html
  - tokenadult 18y ago
    NONE of the "uncommonly difficult IQ tests" mentioned on that very interesting site have ever been properly validated.
    - trapper 18y ago
      Out of interests sake: how does one validate an IQ test?
      - tokenadult 18y ago
        Out of interests sake: how does one validate an IQ test? Thanks for asking the important follow-up question that is so rarely asked. To validate an IQ test (a test that purports to estimate "general intelligence"), one must first reach a consensus among test designers about some sign of intelligence that is detectable outside the testing room. Over the years, psychologists have proposed various behavioral characteristics of human beings as signs that those human beings are "intelligent," with entering challenging, high-income occupations that require a lot of higher schooling being one criterion proposed for adult IQ tests, and being precocious in school and having good grades and good teacher ratings being one criterion that is proposed for child IQ tests. One finds a sample of persons to take a new brand of test in its norming administration, and rates those persons by external criteria of "intelligence," weighting those criteria by consensus, and then checks the rank-order correlation between the ranking of the test-takers yielded by the IQ test and the ranking of the test-takers yielded by the validation criteria. There will NEVER be a perfect ("1.0") correlation between the test and the validation criterion, just as there is never a perfect correlation between IQ scores on one occasion and IQ scores on another occasion on the same brand of IQ test by the same group of test-takers. There is enough play in the joints in both IQ test scoring (whatever the brand of test) and ranking people by other validation criteria (whatever they are), that strictly speaking one can't say that there is any all-time, universally significant ranking of human beings by intelligence. But a close-enough-for-government-work validation study would show an IQ test having correlations above .80, and perhaps even above .90, in comparison with previous brands of IQ tests, or in comparison with subsets of its own item content, or in comparison with some well regarded external validation criterion. For reasons mentioned in another comment in this thread (above?), there is especially little reliability, and hence especially little validity, for IQ scores far above the population mean, and thus it's very hard to devise a validation criterion that would sort, say, members of Mensa http://www.mensa.org/ http://www.mensa.org/ or members of the Study of Exceptional Talent http://cty.jhu.edu/set/index.html http://cty.jhu.edu/set/index.html or members of the Davidson Young Scholars program http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/ http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/ into their "true" rank order by IQ, not to mention that IQ scores for the same individual can and do change over the course of life.
jhancock 18y ago
The only thing I remember about being hauled out of class at about the same age, was sitting in a room with some guy I'd never met and taking some test thinking "this is complete BS...I don't want to be here".

Dilpil 18y ago

The concept of intelligence quotient is subjects score divided by average score of people subjects age. This is a pretty ridiculous metric, and anyone can see that the younger you are the better chance you have of scoring a genius IQ.

tokenadult 18y ago
Current IQ test scoring is always done on the basis of standard deviation scores for the comparison population. That is because, as you correctly point out, child IQ scores lead to nonsense results if they are taken to be ratios of one "mental age" to another "mental age."

tokenadult 18y ago

IQ tests don't measure intelligence perfectly, especially at the higher ranges. I would not use the word "measure" at all, but rather the word "estimate," for theoretical reasons mentioned by psychologist Joel Michell. It is well known that reliability of IQ tests is at its worst at the highest level of IQ scores. The author of the test that Marilyn vos Savant took was among the first to say so: "The reader should not lose sight of the fact that a test with even a high reliability yields scores which have an appreciable probable error. The probable error in terms of mental age is of course larger with older than with young children because of the increasing spread of mental age as we go from younger to older groups. For this reason it has been customary to express the P.E. [probable error] of a Binet score in terms of I.Q., since the spread of Binet I.Q.'s is fairly constant from age to age. However, when our correlation arrays [between Form L and Form M] were plotted for separate age groups they were all discovered to be distinctly fan-shaped. Figure 3 [not shown here on HN, alas] is typical of the arrays at every age level. "From Figure 3 it becomes clear that the probable error of an I.Q. score is not a constant amount, but a variable which increases as I.Q. increases. It has frequently been noted in the literature that gifted subjects show greater I.Q. fluctuation than do clinical cases with low I.Q.'s . . . . we now see that this trend is inherent in the I.Q. technique itself, and might have been predicted on logical grounds." (Terman & Merrill, 1937, p. 44)

Alex3917 18y ago
IMHO, the word measure seems more appropriate. Your IQ is just a number that measures how many questions you got right on an IQ test with the number of questions the median person got right. It's an exact number, not an estimate. As for what this means, it's neither a measure or an estimate. It just is. It might correlate with some stuff, but it doesn't seem appropriate to use either 'measure' or 'estimate' to describe any such relationships.
- tokenadult 18y ago
  Your IQ is just a number that measures how many questions you got right on an IQ test with the number of questions the median person got right. It's an exact number, not an estimate. No, the IQ test result purports to say something about the test-taker's "intelligence," that is about how the test-taker would perform doing other tasks on a different occasion. And that is why every IQ test result is best described as an estimate. The longer answer about why most mental test results are best not described as measurements has to do with the technical meaning of "measurement" as it has developed in sciences preceding psychology, and that answer is given very nuanced discussion in Joel Michell's book Measurement in Psychology http://books.google.com/books?id=QXAAhBN8ZScC&dq=Joel+Michell&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=4Km0k2dyIU&sig=iYJkACquLj4Zo5WZSxXtB1Jq6Tg&hl=en&ei=oJDiSffRB5qYtAPlkem4CQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6 http://books.google.com/books?id=QXAAhBN8ZScC&dq=Joel+Mi... P.S. IQ test scores typically do NOT describe in any straightforward way what the item-content score of the test-taker was, and it's possible, on the same form of the same brand of IQ test, to obtain identical IQ scores with other test-takers without having identical item-content performance.

ivankirigin 18y ago

Any talk of IQ should include "the point", i.e. why you're paying attention. If measuring IQ corresponds with a wide reaching genetic study to find precursors for intelligence - awesome. If we're looking for reason to label a racial subset "lesser", than it's a waste. I remember a really awkward moment in 6th grade, where my teacher took me aside and told me that my tested IQ was top of the class, higher than hers, and only equal to her son's (also in the class). What in god's name could I say to that?

nostrademons 18y ago
"Umm, okay"? I think my response when I found out what my IQ was was, "That's nice."
jhancock 18y ago
As a child, I was never told what I tested at. What I was told is that they aren't supposed to tell you. Of course, once they start moving you into different groups of students you know you test out in the upper "bucket", but still, your not supposed to know your IQ score. Is my experience the norm here? Or did others here get told their score as a child?
- sho 18y ago
  I wasn't told mine directly, but I found it out later by reading the assessment letter (I was forced to take a test to see if there was a learning-disability explanation to my poor grades).
- dhimes 18y ago
  I had the same experience you describe.
- Retric 18y ago
  The same thing happened to me. I was classified "Exceptionally Gifted / Learning Disabled" which seems like a contradiction in terms but seems fairly accurate. The school would bend over backwards for me because of the LD issue, but I saw little difference from the EG part of things. Mainly it seemed like they had no idea what to do with me. For example: I was in a remedial English class in 8th grade and then bumped the next year into the Honors English class which I passed by the skin of my teeth. PS: While I spent a few hours taking a lot of 1 on 1 tests I don't know if they did a real IQ test and I got over 160 or if it was a "soft test" and they used the same term.